Sunday, December 21, 2014

This Is Why Journalists Make Shitty Historians

The WaPo - fluffing Neoconservative foreign policy since...well, forever - thinks that we shouldn't open to Cuba because China and Vietnam are still autocracies. We have been open to those nations for about 25 years, if you mark it with Most Favored Nation status.

Are China and Vietnam free? Of course not. But there are signs and portents of democratic stirrings. The CCP has allowed entrepreneurs to join. While the Great Fire Wall of China still exists, most of my Chinese students can get around most of it when needed.

Newspapers exist in the 24 hour news cycle, a cycle which I think has done more harm to American policy making than anything else. They can't tolerate anything but immediacy.

We are not opening to Cuba to have democracy there in 2016, but in 2026. That's the long game, the game that historians see and Fred Hiatt can't.